Katie Lee Biegel Admits Hosting 'Top Chef' Didn't 'Feel Right' After Being Replaced by Padma Lakshmi

Mar. 15, 2025

Photo: David Keith Photography

Katie Lee Biegelis opening up about her short-lived tenure as the host ofTop Chef.

“[Top Chef] was really not the right vehicle for me,” she said. “Learning that and learning to be able to say, ‘This is a great opportunity, but it doesn’t feel right.’ It took me a while after to understand that, and taking your ego out of it.”

She continued, “You’ve gotta be true to yourself and that’s when you’ll find success.”

Biegel hosted the show’s first season before being replaced with modelPadma Lakshmi, who hosts it to this day.

David Keith Photography

“It was a great learning experience,” said Biegel. “It was not the right vehicle for me, to have to be authoritative in that sense.”

Biegel doesn’t like “to criticize people,” she said. “I do a lot of judging now, and I always try to find the good things to say to people as much as I can and for criticism to be constructive because somebody poured their heart out into making it. You can always find something that somebody did right.”

NBC/Bravo

The cook is currently a co-host onThe Kitchen, which recently wrapped up its 32nd season on the Food Network. ThoughTop Chefwas not, this show was Biegel’s perfect match.

“I love doingThe Kitchen, we have the best time,” she said. “I love being part of an ensemble, it actually takes a lot of pressure away because you have people you play off of and we genuinely like each other so much it’s become ‘these people are my family members’ and I feel like I can say just about anything to them. I just feel so fortunate that it’s been going on for so long, none of us can believe it still.”

Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up to date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Biegel is constantly learning from her costars, Geoffrey Zakarian, Jeff Mauro, Sunny Anderson, and Marcela Valladolid. “Every time we’re filming I feel like I’m learning the whole time,” she said.

Her favorite lesson was from Zakarian. “When he was making a BLT, he sliced the tomatoes on a cutting board. He spread the bacon on a baking sheet and took a pastry brush and painted the tomato juice from the cutting board onto the bacon. I said ‘oh Geoffrey, come on. That’s not doing anything.’ Let me tell you – it makes the best bacon. It gets this sweetness from the tomato juice, it concentrates when it’s baking.”

source: people.com